Minnesota iron minors have lost their jobs, but not their faith in Trump’s prices

Until everything stops in mid -March, Jon Bird worked a quarter of 12 hours, four days a week – shovel La Roche, make the scourge mud and operate huge iron miners in a mine in northern Minnesota.

The mines of the State iron chain, where Mr. Bird was born and grew up-and where his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather worked in the stands before him-sit at the top of a domestic supply funnel. The ore, extract and crushed, is also transformed, shipped, melted in a high stove, transformed into steel, then taken into mounting lines, where it is shaped into household appliances and cars.

But the demand for cars and other large items filled with metals collapsed in 2024, a difficult year for the industry. The steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs, who has the mine where Mr. Bird Works, reported a loss of $ 483 million for the first three months of 2025, which meant that jobs were at stake, including his.

When Mr. Bird, 33, discovered that he was dismissed, he did not hear him of “cliffs”. He said. Rather, he learned about it in a segment of reducing news on the local television channel, Wdie, when he was with his children one of his days off. Some 1,200 employees of Cleveland-Cliffs were affected, 600 in Minnesota.

“It’s a hell of a way to discover that you lose your job,” he said. “It looks like a slap opposite, honestly, of the American company.”

However, one thing currently uniting Cleveland-Cliffs and Mr. Bird, a member of the United Steelworkers Union, is support for President Trump’s prices: a 25% tax on steel and aluminum imports as well as a 25% rate on all imported cars.